Connectivity & Sensors: NFC, Humidity, Barometric

As the followup to a blog on essential smartphone sensors, Teardown.com talks about what Near Field Communications hardware and barometric and humidity sensors are found in today's smart devices.

As the followup to my blog on essential smartphone sensors, today I'll talk about what Near Field Communications (NFC) hardware and barometric and humidity sensors can be found in today's smart devices.

Since July 2012, Teardown.com has published 87 Deep Dive Teardown analyses in the mobile devices channel, which covers phones, tablets, and laptops. These devices represent a broad sample of manufacturers, price tiers, and markets.

Of this sampling of devices, the number of units and percentage of samples in which these functions were observed can be seen in Table 1.

(Source: Teardown.com)

NFC hardware
The current players in NFC are NXP Semiconductor, Broadcom, Inside Secure, and STMicroelectronics. NXP's NFC radio chipsets are most often identified in our teardown analysis, with the PN544 and PN65 integrated circuits appearing 13 times each. The NXP parts have been observed since the third quarter of 2012. The PN65 was last seen in a device that shipped in June 2013. The PN544 was observed in a device launched in February 2014.

Broadcom's ICs showed up in nearly a third of our teardowns, with its BCM20793 and BCM20794 parts appearing six times each. Both Broadcom parts have been seen in recent teardowns. The number of occurrences and their share can be seen in Table 2.

Thank you for digging into the gadgets and sharing the valuable information. This kind of exercises helps in learning about the existing and new sensors. For example I did not know about BMP180 (barometric pressure sensor). Visiting the website of Bosch again I learned that they offer another one in the same line card - BME280, which is a Barometric Pressure, Humidity and Temperature sensors integrated in a small eight pad package with SPI/I2C interface.